


All Stories

by shirogiku



Series: Root Causes & Shaky Foundations [9]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst and Humor, Biblical References, Classical References, Don't Hire Silver As Your Shrink, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Greek Mythology - Freeform, James's Grief, M/M, Or Is he?, Post-Season/Series 03, Pre-Slash, Silver Is Just Trying To Help, Silver's Leg, Silver's Stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 07:27:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6648061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirogiku/pseuds/shirogiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>How we tell a story says as much about us as about the story.</i>
</p><p>(In which James never knows which of Silver's ulterior motives are the worst.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Stories

**Author's Note:**

> The Thomas quotes are from the previous fics in the series, whoops :)

                                                                                                                            Let me tell you a story about war.

                                                                                                                            A fisherman’s son and his dead brother sat on the shore.

_That is my country and this is your country_

_and the line in the sand is the threshold between them_ ,

                                                                                                                             said the dead brother.

 _Yes_ , said the fisherman’s son.

 

                                                                                                                              You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

 

                                                                                                                              Bird 1: This is the wrong story.

                                                                                                                              Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient.

                                                                                                                              — Richard Siken, _The War of the Foxes_

 

James was not, nor had he ever aspired to be, a great storyteller. Hal had been much better at good old seafaring jokes and anecdotes - all perfectly true, of course. Captain Flint, James’s larger-than-life ghost story, had ended up possessing him and feasting on the remains of Lieutenant McGraw. When sleep would not come and he would lie awake and alert for any irregular noise outside, Miranda would stroke his hair and sign him a lullaby from some faraway land.

 _How we tell a story says as much about us as about the story. One can learn more about the ancient Athenians from Aeschylus’s plays than from the ruins of their temples._ James had seen Thomas in tears over the lost pieces of the Prometheus trilogy and then some over Sappho’s fragmented legacy. _Perhaps, the day will come when we, as a culture, will be able to fixate not on how cruelly the Fire-Bringer was punished, but on the fact that his punishment did not last forever. Heracles broke Prometheus’s chains and killed the eagle that had been eating his liver. Now, the question remains whether the eagle’s death was necessary-_ When Thomas told you a story… well, it had only ever been an invitation to live it with him, and none of James’s yelling that the very idea of reconciliation with Zeus was absurd ever discouraged Thomas from their little debates.

James was too used to rip currents and treacherous shoals not to find them everywhere he turned to. In hindsight, John’s words had made him wonder. Had he created his new silver-tongued devil himself, fashioning tools of war with one hand and an instrument of his own destruction with the other? There was something poetic about it, and also something mythical, a clueless smile chipping off to reveal a hungry demon underneath. But in the end, James always dismissed such thoughts because if Silver was a devil, he was the devil James knew all too well by now.

When John spun his yarns, it was like watching a cardsharp at work, shuffling his decks. Or maybe a man with a harpoon, aiming for his audience’s minds and hearts alike. Tonight, he was stealing from the Good Book.

Samson was a mighty, unbeatable captain, and Delilah his port wife and also a witch. After cutting off his hair, a dark ritual so the Devil couldn’t recognise him and collect his due, she convinced her lover to hide inside a church.

Flint rolled his eyes, taking a longer swig of rum - Silver’s imagination had been running rampant lately.

Samson’s human enemies caught up with him, but the little Spanish church collapsed over their heads. The End. If the moral of that one was never to trust a woman, then Silver ought to mind his own mane before anyone else’s.

 _Oh, James, does_ everyone _die in this lovely tale of yours?_

The rum blocked his throat. Miranda was finally at peace, but Thomas’s ghost was made of a finer fabric - words and warm breeze on James’s tired skin. How could he ever exorcise that?

The more the war raged on, the heavier its toll. In the lantern-light, Silver’s face was a gaunt, grim mask. At times, James could hardly recognise it, but he didn’t like to dwell on that either. It had been Silver’s choice, this change, not anything that James or anybody else could have forced upon him.

The bottle was half-empty, his mind adrift. Tales of Vane’s exploits had been growing in popularity, as if he had been dead for at least half a century. James himself had already lost not one but _two_ wagers about which were based on actual events, and he had been there the entire bloody decade. People kept telling him that he needed a broader focus, which was not the same as a bigger spyglass.

Nobody was bothering him right now, though, what with Silver playing the life and soul of the ship. As snatches of John’s voice insinuated their way back to the forefront, he choked on his drink:

“... and they were happy, as happy as two men such as them could be in dear old Mother England. That is, until Thaw’s father found out. Oh, a man like that, when angered, would obtain all the evidence he needed without thrusting his hand between the lovers.” The crew laughed merrily. “Captain Tiller lost his command and had a damn narrow escape from the noose. As to his lover, oh well, it was Bedlam for him, to cure him of his unfortunate affliction.”

Flint’s head spun. A roaring was building up inside it - for his rage had one name and one name alone - and it just fucking went on and on. Thaw became the Lunatics’ King and Prophet, and Flint couldn’t sit still another moment.

He caught Silver’s gaze on him, speculative but utterly unreadable. His mouth twisted into a snarl, even as Silver gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

Slowly, carefully, James stretched himself, and stalked back into his den.

By the time he heard the telltale thudding walk, he had managed to compose himself, watching the door like he would watch the enemy lines. For somebody whose survival instinct was so sharply honed, Silver certainly neglected to listen to it.

The Quartermaster paused as his boot crunched on broken glass. Flint said nothing. If Silver was waiting for an outburst, he would have to keep waiting until there was a good man or woman on the English throne.

The wretch cleared his throat. “ _You slippery sack of shit!_ ” he parroted. “ _If I snap your fucking neck right now, it would be too many honours._ ” He did his own voice too, protesting that he had done no wrong, then casting another expectant look at Flint.

“By all means, do carry on,” he said with a magnanimous wave of his hand. “You were doing _so_ well.” He could practically retire, never mind that Silver couldn’t actually sail a ship or describe a sea battle without his help. “Somewhere down the line, there’ll be a fucking good explanation, I assume.”

Silver fingered his necklace. “Captain. Do you remember how we took the Spanish warship together?”

He lowered his chin. “Are you _quite_ sure it was me and you and not, say, Mr. Little and Captain Fin?” His palm settled against the desk’s edge, which he grasped to conceal the tremor in it.

Another skipped beat. Gratifying. “Captain Fin, he was enraged because not everything was going according to his plan.” With some effort, Silver straddled a chair backwards, despite the lack of invitation to stay. Not that he had needed it for the past months. “I was doing what I always do, Captain. Reminding our men why we, _all_ of us, fight and what England can do to us. Also, keeping their minds off what comes next.” Next must necessarily come a specific kind of prize, or they would be fucked for supplies and munitions. “If they cannot know _your_ story, I thought, well, let them know someone else’s.” The sheer fucking _nerve_! “And I confess, it won’t stop haunting me, so I had to do _something_ with it.”

Something like yank Flint’s chain? At this juncture, neither of them was expendable or replaceable, but before this performance, Silver had never turned that so fully against him. He held onto his white-hot anger for dear life because the moment it was gone, there would be nothing left but the cold, dark water.

“Where did all that fine detail about Bedlam come from?” It wasn’t the question that he had meant to ask, but it had escaped him anyway, stunning him.

“I once knew a man who had broken himself out of there.” Silver smiled. “Sheer dumb luck.”

Flint rose to his feet. “Are _all_ of your stories looted from some wreck or the other?”

“Most of them don’t give me such powerful nightmares, though.”

Oh, this sack of shit had nightmares, did he? James circled Silver’s chair leisurely and put his hands on Silver’s shoulders, leaning in to whisper in his ear: “I find myself sadly unable to _cut out your fucking tongue_ , Mr. Silver, nor can I ban your precious freedom of speech. But rest assured, you’re not the _only_ one here with a long memory. And believe me, I can make your life a real living hell if I put my mind to it.

As he pulled away, Silver’s eyes told him: _I am not afraid of you anymore._

Which brought him back to another night, another campfire. He had lost track of how many there had been, and he should be warier of that than he was. Silver’s power to rouse his ire was undeniable, but the calm, sharp certainty that he could bring was much more addictive than rum. The men all but worshipped him for it.

“Who is Solomon Little?” he had asked, amused by Silver’s show of confusion. “The antihero of so many of your tales. It practically feels like we’re old friends.”

Silver shrugged. “Nobody. Anybody. Could be me. Maybe my father was a Jew, and that’s where I get all my best qualities from.”

He smiled. “Meaning your worst?”

“My _best_.” Silver leaned towards him. “It’s inconceivable to you, isn’t it? That a man should be so divorced from his past that it can be replaced with anything and everything. That _having_ a past should matter so little and define even less. You could learn a thing or two from Mr. Little, you know.”

Now, that wasn’t exactly true, was it? James glanced at the boot. “What if I were to tell you that your past is simply more recent?”

He had struck a nerve. “Are you implying that everything I do, I do because of my fucking leg?”

“No, you do what you do because it feels good.” Silver’s own words, not his. “But it wouldn’t have felt so good without you having suffered a loss equal to mine first.” Silver must have cherished his freedom of movement very much indeed, for all his talk of settling down. Or he hadn’t even realised what he had before loosing it.

“I’ll have you know,” Silver’s face trembled, his voice raw with emotion, “I’ve come to terms with it, come to view it as an _advantage_ , while you, you _wallow_ in your grief as if you were the first man on Earth to have loved and lost.”

“ _Captain Flint cannot love anyone!_ ”

Resurfacing from the memory, Flint added, “It must be awful being you, Mr. Silver. Not knowing where you come from or where you’re going.”

Silver snorted. “Oh, _I_ know where I’m going alright. Off to another battle, with you. And you have just told me everything I wanted to know tonight. He is still alive.” _Who_? “You still care, so James McGraw lives on, if this state of half animation could be called ‘life’.”

Flint flung himself at Silver, gripping the back of Silver’s chair. “And what would you have me do, _finish him off_?”

Silver twisted around at an awkward angle. “Make no mistake, I don’t want him dead. I just want him to stop being in so much pain, it’s fucking unbearable.”

Flint stared at him. He certainly had an eerie way of showing it!

“Death may very well be his only option,” Flint murmured, putting some distance between them once again. “Which does _not_ justify twisting the knife.” It had been there for so many years, and he had shown it to Silver because he had allowed himself to believe that they _were_ friends, before anything else.

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that I may be pulling it out, inch by bloody inch? How can you tell the difference, after so long?”

He couldn’t read the truth on Silver’s face or in his movements, and he didn’t trust Silver’s voice.

It had been such a relief to say Thomas’s name, as if the very act could cleanse it from being spoken by men like Rogers. It had felt almost like freedom. But the more he told John about Thomas, the less Silver was inclined to listen, as if the words that left his mouth were entirely different from those in Silver’s ears.

There was no turning back. This, what they had with Silver, was but a twisted imitation. The man that James had become was outside of Thomas’s reach. At least someone was there, would always be there, and wouldn’t break. He was so bloody tired of broken things.

“Everything is just a story,” Silver said, his hand on James’s back. “If we aren’t careful, one day, we shall become an inspiration like your Prometheus.”

“So fucking tell it _properly_!” he snarled. “Tell it like it _should_ be told, not like a penny farce!”

Silver gaped at him. “Oh, excuse me, you were ready to murder me not because I’d overstepped the bounds, but because I had done it _badly_?”

He showed Silver his teeth. “What makes you think it can’t be both?”

Silver shook his head incredulously. “It’s not me you’ve been raging at. For the most part.” Ha. “It’s you yourself. You’re still beating yourself up for not having rescued him.” James’s fists were up in the air when Silver added, catching them: “And rightfully so: if someone threw _me_ in a place like that, I wouldn’t wait for a rescue, but an honourable man with such high-flown notions? Definitely no chances of survival without some outside help.”

Flint resigned himself to another bottle.

Silver’s fingers gripped his shoulder. “That being said, you do have a choice to make: either you’re here, leading this war with me, or you’re decorating a hell of your own design. But you can’t have _both_.”

The masterfulness of that maneuver left him momentarily dizzy. They had started with Silver committing a sacrilege and ended up with Silver cornering him, allegedly, for his own good.

He remembered himself saying a while ago, “I can’t imagine a man like you as a deckhand on some merchantman. You must have left your home port in a hurry.”

“A good guess, Captain,” Silver had murmured with a brazen gleam in his eyes. “ _Keep guessing_.”

The wretch was wearing _that_ smirk now. “You did once tell me not to mistake a smile for a sign of weakness. Am I invited to your drinking session, then?”

“Fuck off.” He sank to the floor, profoundly unsurprised by Silver joining in regardless. He uncorked the bottle. “Your recent emphasis on buggerers, it wouldn’t have anything to do with Mr. Naggs, would it?” He snorted at Silver’s look of surprise. “I could’ve hardly missed a thing like that.”

A member of the crew who had just been named - neither the handsomest nor the smelliest - had got himself into a fine tangle with a Maroon man. A _married_ Maroon man, and these people were even less forgiving of adultery than the English. But Silver had come to the rescue yet again, and Mr. Naggs had been delivered from the angry wife’s wrath.

“Did _you_ put him up to it?” As a spy? Had the affair gone wrong or exactly the way Silver had planned it?

“Am I a Nassau Madame?” Silver paused. “The answer is ‘no’ to both, in case there’s any doubt. In fact, I was completely in the dark until the angry wife was dragging him out of the house feet-first.”

Silver _owed_ James. When the ship’s goatfucker had stolen a Maroon goat, it had been Flint who stopped Silver from invoking Moses’s Law - a flogging would have been a hard blow on Silver’s reputation indeed, no matter the original offence. Maybe he should have let it happen anyway.

Silver took the bottle from him. “I swear on my one good leg, I didn’t mean to use your story for the crew’s entertainment. But weren’t you glad to hear them cheering and clamouring for vengeance?”

As if he gave a fuck. It was Silver who depended on their cries for everything. “Miranda is my Delilah, and the memories of Thomas are my chains and eagle - is there no limit to your jealousy?” So like Silver to wish to be the sole governing influence.

But if James refused to bow down to a king or queen, he would damn well _not_ be ruled by a plotter.

His world lurched yet again when he found no malice in Silver’s answering look, just a kind of dogged determination.

“I want to set you _free_ , James,” John insisted. “Why the fuck can’t you see that?”

Because he was not ready. Because _Silver_ was no hero. He reached out to touch Silver’s cheek, feeling the smooth skin below the sharp jut of his cheekbone. It was feverishly warm, or maybe it was his rough hands that were too cold.

Silver held James’s gaze, wetting his lips with his tongue. Things like that made James wonder whether they weren’t still becalmed and dying of thirst. If Thomas had been waiting for him on the other bank, waiting for his and Miranda’s boat, he wouldn't have had the strength to turn back.

Thomas, too, must have known that. But Silver was the only one who was bothered by it; he would have assembled a whole music band with trumpets to yank James back into this world, for good or for ill. A bit of both.

What Silver failed to understand was that coming alive meant remembering more and more, not less. It brought James closer and closer to his lost love because Thomas wasn’t gone. Thomas’s ghost was made of words and wind and love, and James couldn’t have kept all that buried forever. But it was a shaky foundation for something new.

He shifted so that his and Silver’s shoulders were touching. “I’ve just remembered a funny story. And best of all, you won’t be able to retell it because nobody would bloody believe it.”

Silver perked up, taking it as a challenge.

“Once, a lord asked a naval officer why sodomy is such a hanging offence around the Fleet…”


End file.
